iZone International: Twitter releases its own analysis of the top trends of 2010

Over 25 billion tweets have been sent in 2010, and Twitter has, like Google, published a list of the most popular trending topics and analysed the data in other ways as well. They have divided the list as per hashtags, which is how twitter users can search for individual tweets on a particular subject, along with sections like Google made on news events or people, movies, and technology.

The Gulf oil spill and the FIFA World Cup were the two biggest stories on Twitter this year and held people’s attentions for months, which is why the trending information on Google stopped rising after a point, and because of this, Twitter trends can actually paint a more accurate picture of public interest than the Google Zeitgeist.

Popular hashtags, meanwhile, included #rememberwhen, #slapyourself and #confessiontime, which suggest that no matter how much people use Twitter to talk about brands and subjects on the news, they are still predominantly using the service for social chatter.

Unlike Google, Twitter has not released country specific data, so we can’t tell how relevant this information is to India specific analysis, but the growth of Twitter in India over the last one year has been quite fast as well, particularly once they tied up with mobile service providers for SMS updates to Twitter.